He found and removed them, and her hair fell about her shoulders and down her back, heavy, shining, almost black Gypsy hair.
“I intended,” she said, “to have it neatly braided before you came up. Could you not have stayed to drink the inn dry of brandy or port or whatever it is you drink after dinner?”
“Port,” he said. “Brush?” He held out one hand, and she took a brush off the small chest beside the bed and handed it to him. He made a swirling motion with one finger. “Turn.”
Her hair reached to her waist and almost touched the bed behind her. It smelled faintly of gardenia. Her nightgown was of white cotton and covered her as decently as her dresses did during the day. Except that itwasa nightgown and she was obviously wearing no stays beneath it—or anything else, at a guess. And her feet were bare. And she was sitting on a bed.
He drew the brush through her hair. It slid downward from the roots to the tips.
“Two hundred strokes,” she said.
He felt an immediate tightening at his groin. Two hundred?
“Every night,” she added.
“Do you count them?”
“Yes. It was one way my mother taught me numbers.”
She had been quite unaware of the double meaning of her words.
He counted silently.
“I was eighteen,” she said when he was at thirty-nine strokes. “Barely. I had just had my birthday. I had been married a little less than four months.”
He did not prompt her. If she needed to tell the story she had begun downstairs, then he would listen. He had all night, after all, and he knew from his experiences at Penderris that it was important that people be allowed to tell their stories.
Forty-five. Forty-six.
“I was so deeply in love,” she said, “that I did not think the world was large enough to contain it all. Youth is a dangerous time of life.”
Yes, it could be.
Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three.
“I thought his love for me was just as all-consuming,” she said. “I thought we were living happily ever after. How foolish young people can be. Shall I tell you why he married me?”
“If you wish.” Fifty-nine. Sixty.
“He had always been the family rebel,” she said. “He hated them all, particularly his father. But his father could never leave him alone. He had been at him to marry someone suitable—suitable in the eyes of the earl, that was. He had even named a few possible candidates. Matthew was eleven years older than I, you know. He met me at an assembly, found me pretty and eager—and, oh, how right he was about the latter! I was pathetically eager. I wore my heart not just on my sleeve, but on my nose and my forehead and my cheeks and my bosom and…Well. Suffice it to say that I made no secret of my adoration. I was pathetic.”
“You were very young,” he said. Good Lord, she was only twenty-four now. “You were being courted by a handsome military officer.”
“Where was I?” she asked. He did not know wherehewas. He had lost count. Sixty-nine? Seventy? “He fancied himself in love with me, of course, or I daresay he would not have done what he did. But it also occurred to him that it would be a splendid joke on his father if he married me. I was the daughter of a gentleman of no particular distinction. That would have been bad enough in his father’s eyes. He knew too, though, that I was the daughter of an actress and the granddaughter of some unknown Welshman and a Gypsy. And so he married me. He kept a decent silence about that part of his motive until I discovered the existence of his mistress, and then he told me about it—out of spite, I suppose, though he laughed as he told the tale and invited me to share the joke with him. Itwasfunny, for it achieved everything he had hoped for. The Earl of Heathmoor was irate. When I refused to allow Matthew to touch me after I made my discovery and then he refused to take me to the Peninsula with his regiment and sent me to Leyland Abbey instead, again out of spite, I was made to feel that I was lower on the scale of significance than the lowliest servant. But because I was a daughter-in-law of the house, I must be subjected to a strict regimen of reeducation. I was not quite nineteen when I went there.”
He lowered the brush to the bed.
“I amnotpleading for your pity,” she said. “Heaven forbid. My life is as it is. There are worse lives. I have never been hungry or literally homeless. No one has ever used physical violence on me worse than the occasional rap over the knuckles or smack on the bottom when I was a child. And now I have been offered the gift of freedom and a hovel of a cottage and a small competence with which to enjoy it. Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is for a woman, Ben? I can be a new person.”
She turned to face him on the bed and tucked her feet right out of sight.
“Then why the mournful look?” he asked.
“Do I look mournful?”
“I suppose,” he said, “it is because you have been forced to bring the old person with you.”
She grimaced. “Whyisthat? It issucha nuisance.”
